Good Music

Interview

Essay

I’m happy to have had a small part in bringing Sufjan Stevens back into the public eye.

Last Thursday, my friends at his record label, Asthmatic Kitty, finally ran with this brief scrivening we worked up about his new instrumental record Run Rabbit Run. Roughly speaking it is a string quartet transcription of his early instrumental experiment Enjoy Your Rabbit. Brassland is well represented on the album, with inspiration for the transcription project coming from my label partner, Bryce Dessner, illustrations from Bryce’s sister Jessica, and an orchestration by Nico Muhly.

In even better news, on Friday, the world-renown festival promoter whom I represent in America, All Tomorrow’s Parties, announced Sufjan’s first US show in more than two years. He’ll be playing the festival we’re throwing upstate at Kutsher’s Country Resort in Monticello, NY from Sept 11-13. A line-up which was previously blowing my mind has now exploded it.

The weekend now includes, among many others, The Feelies, Boredoms, David Cross, Grouper, Iron & Wine, Animal Collective, and Caribou who, for this appearance, will include special guest Marshall Allen (?!?), leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra. A constant news feed on the event can be accessed on this internet webpage.

I’ll leave you with this video of Sun Ra’s group at the height of their powers which, following my recent vid posts of Jason Faulkner and Ornette Coleman, might lead you to believe that I’ve discovered a newfound and inexplicable fascination with jazz. (I will deny this fervently.) Marshall Allen gets his starmaking cameo at the 30 second mark.

I attempt to be as untimely as possible with this blog. Recently, though, I wrote about Yinka Shonibare & various other costume-focused artists. Lo & behold Shonibare is having a midcareer survey in my ‘hood. It starts tomorrow and runs through September 20th.

COLIN STETSON will deliver an opening invocation on solo saxophone. Aside from his work as a soloist, Stetson has brought his unique voice on winds and brass to the stage and studio work of artists including Tom Waits, Arcade Fire, TV on the Radio, Sinead O’Connor, The National, LCD Soundsystem, Bell Orchestre, Antibalas, and Anthony Braxton. Stetson was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and lives in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The featured musical guest will be BUKE & GASS, cover stars of this month’s local scene publication The Deli Magazine, who describe them as “a two man (wall of sound) band – although one of them is a woman.” This South Brooklyn duo consists Arone Dyer (the lady) and Aron Sanchez (the dude) who are able to play bass, guitar, ukulele, kick drum, snare, tambourine and sleigh bells all at the same time thanks to their curious innovation of their custom made instruments. Arone is on buke and voice, Aron plays drum and gass — all of which are filtered through various pedals and amplified by a pair of funny looking stereo guitar amps. Their music is simultaneously clear voiced and fuzzed out, innately hopeful yet redolent of darker things.

READERS

RACHEL COHEN will be reading from her book A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, which traces thirty-six actual encounters among writers and artists over the course of a century. Published in 2004 by Random House, it won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize and the PEN/Martha Albrand First Nonfiction Award. A fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Breadloaf, and the New York Institute for the Humanities, she has published pieces in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books and McSweeney’s, and been anthologized in Best American Essays. She teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Queens, where she is at work on a book about art historian Bernard Berenson for Yale University Press

BRANDON STOSUY‘s presentation will be drawn from his in progress oral history of American black metal, a section of which ran in The Believer. A senior writer at Stereogum and Pitchfork‘s metal columnist, he has written criticism for many publications and collaborated with artists on catalog essays and exhibitions, most recently with Matthew Barney at Munich’s Goetz Collection; with Kai Althoff in a three-part installation at Dispatch Gallery on Henry St; and with Brody Condon for an upcoming sculptural rewriting of William Gibson’s Neuromancer at the New Museum. Stosuy’s 2006 anthology of downtown New York literature, Up Is Up, But So Is Down, Up Is Up, But So Is Down, was selected by the Village Voice as one of their 25 favorite books of 2006. He also curates a monthly heavy metal showcase in Brooklyn called Show No Mercy and occasionally teaches art and literature at NYU.

If luck holds and his wife does not go into labor, MATT LUEM will take part in Brandon’s presentation. Matt is my correspondent about teenage kicks from the west coast.

LAWRENCE WESCHLER‘s reading will be drawn from his books about two visual artists — Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin and True To Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney. Currently director of New York University’s Institute for the Humanities and artistic director for the Chicago Humanities Festival, he was a staff writer at The New Yorker for over twenty years where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He received a Lannan Literary Award in 1998, is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award in Journalism, received a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2006, and was finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

CO-HOST & SERIES FOUNDER

AMANDA STERN is the author of three novels, the critically acclaimed novel, The Long Haul and two young adult novels written under a pseudonym. She founded the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series, out of the Happy Ending Bar in 2003 and has been running, curating and hosting it ever since. She moved the series to Joe’s Pub in January 2009. She’s at work on her next adult novel and a series of three children’s books for the Penguin imprint, Grosset & Dunlap.

CURATOR

In 2001, ALEC HANLEY BEMIS co-founded Brassland, a record label that documents the work of a growing community of musicians, including The National and Nico Muhly. In recent years he has added consulting work for the UK-based festival company All Tomorrow’s Parties and general manager duties at Cantaloupe Music. In 2009, he began co-managing Dirty Projectors, and took a seat on the board of directors for Manhattan New Music Project, a music & education non-profit. In an earlier career, Bemis was a journalist who wrote for outlets including LA Weekly, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate and The Los Angeles Times. He has taught in New York University’s graduate journalism program, produced projects for new media design firm Funny Garbage, and worked as an editor/writer at trend spotter Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Roughly translated PROGRESS & PROCESS is a night about creativity in action — how makers actually make what they make — all their visionary insights and petty concerns. There are sub-themes of duality and repetition; artistic innovation and invention; the psychological relationship between shrink and patient, interviewer and subject; and also some brief insights into make-up, modern clowning and the ways artists outfit themselves to cope with the world’s harsh vacuity, distractions & short attention spans. I hope people will find the contents relevant, stimulating, and occasionally humorous, if not in a “funny ha ha” way, in the manner in which a small baby sometimes puzzles over the food they’re given to eat.

Hello internet users. In about 10 minutes I will be co-DJing with my friend Brian Long on his long-running internet radio show Infinite Eargasm. That is 2pm-4pm EDT, 11am-1pm Pacific. I have just drunk a single glass of red wine and am such a lightweight that the world is starting to spin just a tad slower than it usually does. In other words, this show could be extremely entertaining.

You can hear us by clicking here and then clicking somewhere else on that page. (It’s the internet, lots of clicking!)

I expect to be, erm, spinning an admixture of contemporary classical music, old obscure hardcore tracks, and various other sad sad songs — the emphasis being the flow between them, how to get from point A to point Z.